This four-person team of sysadmins is responsible for a large cluster of midrange computers, reports a pilot fish on the team.

"The four of us took turns coming into work once a month on a Saturday to perform an orderly shutdown and reboot of this large clustered system," fish says.

But then a member of the team moves on, and when the replacement arrives it's clear the new guy is not exactly a team player.

The day before his first scheduled Saturday to perform the orderly shutdown and reboot, the new guy decides his personal time on the weekend is more important than his new job. But he sees a simple solution: He talks to the data center's lead computer operator, and somehow convinces him to tell the operator who's already working on Saturday to reboot the cluster.

That just requires the lead operator to submit some online change-control paperwork, something the lead operator does regularly -- so regularly, in fact, that he has template forms for almost everything he's responsible for, including mainframe restarts.

But the lead operator has never submitted a request for the midrange cluster. "He forgot to change his online template change form from the mainframe to the cluster," groans fish.

"The IBM mainframe was then shut down and restarted on Saturday morning -- while hundreds of employees sat in front of frozen mainframe terminal sessions for over an hour!"

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